Abstract

We use scanning tunneling microscopy to establish controlled contacts to single molecules of endohedrally dopedfullerenes with as a reference. The stability of the experimental setup allows for the determination of the conductance of relative to the conductance of . The endohedral doping reduces the conductance of by a factor of about five with respect to . Ab initio calculations show that the reason for this reduced conductance is the absence of electron orbitals delocalized over the cage of in the energy window of the conductance measurement.

Received 06 May 2009Accepted 02 September 2009Published online 01 October 2009

Acknowledgments:

This work was supported by the FP6 project NANOCAGE (Grant No. MEST-CT-2004-50-6854), the Science Foundation of Ireland, and Czech Project MSM Grant No. 0021620834. We acknowledge the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) for generous allotment of computer resources.